Only a few months ago, myself, my sweetheart and his daughter sat around the table and discussed politics. Mike liked Edwards, Sonia took a stance for Hillary, and I was smitten by Obama.
All three were attractive, well spoken, and appeared to be grown-ups, unlike the Republicans, who were squabbling, quibbling and looking worse by the minute.
As a woman, and one of a certain age, I felt a twinge of guilt NOT to support Hillary Clinton.
In the thirty years since the feminist revolution, the balance of power is still, very much on the side of one gender. Pick up any newspaper or magazine, and scan through the names, whether it's writers or artists, administrators, or the Congressional Record, men will outnumber the woman by about four to one.
Shirley Chisholm once said "I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black."
Yesterday, on NPR, I heard "We won't be respected by other nations if we have a woman as a president."
A hundred years after suffrage-- after Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi-- it's a disturbing comment. For Sonia, such naked misogyny exposed a hidden seam in our culture. She was, at least in part, motivated for Hillary by the opposition against her.
The misbegotten "regime change" in Iraq is the issue that has been a deciding one for me.
In the run up to the war, only a handful of people had the perspicuity and the courage to buck that wave. Obama was one of them.
For me, that says a lot about judgement.
When a woman feels a need to start waving her association with guns around and wax bellicose about Iran, we've already lost the election. You may secure the Presidency, Hillary, but the right, who ought to be run out of Washington tarred and feathered, given their abysmal failures, are back in the cat seat, talking through your mouth.
I'd like to see a woman give compelling reasons to the American public to explain why violence doesn't work to combat violence.
To argue for responsible policies, so we might never again witness the crumpled bodies of students bleeding into the carpets of their college classrooms. Or burnt and blackened American bodies being strung up on telephone wires.
I can't support a woman who feels she has to act like a man to be respected. What we don't need, in this world, is more pissing contests.
We do need the energy and hope of a generation of young people who believe that they can make a difference.
We need a leader can discern and communicate the complexities of our world. Someone who can speak to the hearts and minds of Americans, and take us forward. That's why I believe in Obama.
I never thought I'd say this, but, in the end, it matters less what gender a President is. It matters more what decisions they make, what direction they take us.